How to evaluate Tailwind Tribes to join

Have you been pinning for a while now, but just struggling to get any real traffic? Your pins just wont go viral, and the Group Boards have been next to useless for you? Your website traffic is stagnating, and you don’t know what to do?

Well, I have news for you. If you aren’t already using Tailwind, then you need to.

Tailwinds is a web application that does a few really awesome things.

Before you sign up to one of the Tailwind paid plans, I recommend trying it out for free first. You get to schedule up to 100 pins for free, and 30 submissions per month to your tribes (choose 5 tribes). Once you start using Tailwind for free, you’ll see the value it provides and it is definitely worth upgrading to one of the paid plans at the end of your trial.

Schedule your pins.

This is by far a serious time saver. To be a successful blogger on Pinterest and grow your reach, Pinterest wants to see you contribute consistently to the platform. That usually means pinning around 20 - 30 high quality pins every day. You also don’t want to be pinning those pins all at once in bursts of pinning as too many pins in a short period of time is a signal for spammy behavior.

But really, who has time to be on Pinterest all day long pinning. We all have a million other things to do right.

That is where Pin schedulers come in. Tailwinds is awesome for this.

Instead of pinning directly on Pinterest, Tailwind allows you to schedule a pin. They also analyze your account and find the most optimal times in a day to be pinning to reach your audience.

With this technique, you can spend a few minutes each day (or an hour at the start of each month), and line up your pins for the month. Before you know it, you will have days worth of pins scheduled, and you can go off and do other things while your Pinterest account is on automatic.

Tribes

Tailwind Tribes is the other big feature Pinterest bloggers use frequently.

The concept of Tribes is similar to a secret Group Board on Pinterest. It has a number of members that join a tribe focused on a particular niche topic. Members post pins to the tribe related to that niche. However, usually for every pin submitted, the member must re-share 1 or more pins from that tribe.

This is what makes tribes so awesome. If you have interesting pins, then another member is likely to share it to their boards, exposing your pins to an audience you wouldn’t have had otherwise.

What makes tribes so much better than group boards is that the if you join tribes that are active, then you have a much higher chance of your pins being shared. With group boards, I find a lot of the time pins go there to die. Very few pins get shared, and there are so many low quality group boards out there. The good ones can be very difficult to join or they don’t accept new contributors.

How to Join a Tribe

Joining a tribe is easy on Tailwind.

Once you have signed up and logged in, you will see Tribes in the left hand navigation menu.

Click on Tribes, and then Find a Tribe.

On the free plan (and plus plan) you get the option to join up to 5 tribes. You need to purchase a Power Up to join more.

On the Find a Tribe tab, you can search for tribes in your niche.

In the screenshot below, I performed a search for “Blogging” to find tribes related to the Blogging niche.

There are a few things to evaluate before deciding if you should join that tribe.

1. Look at the Tribe Name and the Tags. Does it look like it would relate to your niche.
2. Check the blue Activity bars on the right. You ideally want to join Tribes that have 4 or 5 bars. That means the tribe is pretty active.
3. Look at the number of Members in the tribe. Bigger doesn’t always mean better though. It’s a good idea to join a few large tribes, and a few smaller ones. With the larger tribes, your pins can easily get lost in the feed as many active members can be posting content, pushing your pins further down the feed. However, with smaller tribes, you end up with fewer members to share your pins. You really need to experiment to find which tribes end up working well for your content. It is perfectly okay to leave a tribe if its not working out.
4. Preview the Tribe. Look at the quality of the pins in the tribe. Is it interesting to you and would that content be interesting to your readers - as you will be sharing a lot of this content also.
5. Calculate the Tribe Engagement levels.

How to Calculate the Tribe Engagement Level

Okay, so this is a secret you wont read anywhere else. I came up with this approach after getting frustrated about some of my tribes and why some performed better than others.

Engagement is essentially calculated as Virality / User, where Virality is Reshares/Pin.

So for a Tailwind Tribe, I calculate Tribe Engagement as:

Tribe Engagement = Num Reshares / Num Members

This will essentially tell you (on average) how many reshares you can expect per member.

If there are many inactive members, then the engagement will be lower. Likewise, if not much sharing is going on in the tribe, then engagement will also be lower.

There is no magic number to look for with Tribe Engagement. But what you can do is log these numbers in a spreadsheet for each tribe you join. Compare them.

Do you have Tribes that have a low engagement score?

If the answer is yes, and you have noticed your own pins get very little sharing in that tribe, then it’s probably time to leave it for something better.

When joining a new tribe, you can calculate these numbers before you join it by pulling the values from the Preview. If the engagement value comes out higher than your current tribes, then it’s a good indicator to get on that Tribe.

Tracking Tribe Performance

Before giving up on a Tribe, track your performance of it over the span of 4 weeks. You may be getting shares but they are scheduled out so you don’t get the repins or views from it for a while out.

Tailwind will send out a weekly report. Log those numbers into a spreadsheet to track the number of pins you scheduled that week, along with the number of reshares and repins you received and the potential reach.

Over the span of 4 weeks, look at which of your tribes are performing well, and which ones are not. Compare your performance with the performance of the Tribe overall. Are you on par with the tribe, or is the tribe rejecting your content.

If your performance is low, then consider joining other tribes at that point that may be better suited to your niche, or where there are more active members.

When to post a new pin to a Tribe

Another question I often get is when to post a new pin to a Tribe. There really is no set time. You can pin when you want. However, each tribe may have members who are more active at certain times of the day. You really need to experiment to find out what time that is. Each tribe will be different.

A good indicator is most bloggers will probably be looking at Tailwind first thing in the morning (eg 8am), around lunch (if they have a day job), and maybe in the evening (8pm) once their kids are in bed. Adjust for time zones of course.

I recommend posting at different times, and keep track of how many pins you get to find when the best time to post is.

If you post when the members aren’t very active, then chances are that by the time the majority of members log in and look at the tribe, your post will have already fallen down the feed and they simply wont scroll down far enough hurting your chances of getting more shares.